Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Nah. You have a new tech under your command, or whatever you fleeties call it. It would make sense. And even if it raised suspicions, it’s not like anyone curious enough to come poking around could get through.”

  “Full of yourself,” she said.

  They snorted. “I’m really not.”

  “You didn’t knock on my door three hours after lights out to assess my net security.”

  “No. But maybe I should have. Great fucking fuck, Greeve, when was the last time you patched? This is so, so out of date.”

  She crossed her arms a little tighter. “About two years out of date?”

  “Yeah, actually. How—Oh. Fuck. Sorry. I’ll clean it up for you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll grant you admin access.”

  They chuckled. “That’s what I’m saying. I already have it.”

  “Arden.”

  “Right. You know how to follow-on?”

  “Yes, I went to preschool, doofus. I’m not a Luddite.”

  “Hey, I didn’t want to assume, and…” They trailed off, looked around the crates, and shuddered. “Anyway. Tag me for a follow.”

  She brought up the UI to friend-and-follow, and found the space they should have been inhabiting marked with a blank ident field.

  “Uh, I’m not sure it’s working…”

  “Is it empty?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s me.”

  “How?”

  “You really don’t want me to delve into a technical explanation. Let’s go.”

  She sighed and tagged the empty card, feeling foolish as the default blank-person icon popped up in her friends list. The card didn’t even have a false name, or ident number. It was a shell where a person should be.

  The net flashed by in a blur of neon colors as Arden took the lead, whipping them through spaces and gates and security protocols Sanda could barely even glimpse. Space didn’t have much meaning in the net. There was a geography to it, locations mapped and spread out in a way that human minds could more easily parse, but technically, Arden should be able to will them to where they wanted to be.

  They were muddying the waters. Sanda didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about security, but she could guess it’d be easier to track someone jumping from point A to point B than to follow someone flitting around like this, passing through systems that, while Sanda didn’t understand them, even she could tell were heavily secured.

  Maybe Arden was worried because of the lack of appropriate security in Sanda’s net space, but she doubted it. She had the feeling that this was something they did often. Not a well-worn path, exactly, that would be too telling, but an instinct for evasion.

  Their breathless ping-ponging came to a disorienting halt. She may not have a body to feel dizzy with, but the abrupt stop was enough to make her head spin. When she gathered herself, they were floating in null space, a pocket of the net where data had yet to invade. The nebulous edges of the digital universe into which information would, eventually, expand.

  “I don’t—”

  Arden held up a hand. “Give it a moment. I’ve injected your visualization tools with a script to let you see.”

  “Definitely illegal.”

  “It’s not even the most illegal thing I’ve done in the last twenty seconds.”

  Maybe it was the word they’d used—injected—but she started to feel… different. Not ill or disoriented, but more solid, more real in this place made up of ones and zeros abstracted to the extreme. Purely psychosomatic, she told herself, because that’s what all her instructors had said about the net. Without neural feedback devices, a goggle-accessed net couldn’t tickle your nervous system. Couldn’t make you feel anything real.

  But the visual, as Arden had implied, was the point.

  A veil she hadn’t known existed lifted from her eyes. The “place” she and Arden inhabited, their virtual backs to the virtual cities of the universe, was empty aside from them, but way out in the distance… something was there.

  She squinted, as if that helped. “What is it?”

  “An anomaly,” Arden said, as if that explained anything at all. They caught her giving them side-eye and shrugged. “I don’t know. I come out here to the fringes sometimes to think. People find the null zones unsettling, and that’s by design. You can’t see it with what I’ve given you, but there are repellent code strings out here. Spend time in the null and most people feel disoriented, disassociated. Stay too long and it’s easy to lose yourself, but most retreat to the planned zones before that happens. Prime SysAdmins don’t want fringers coming out here to build their own infrastructure in unused space, so they make it unsettling in a way that’s hard to pin down.”

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “No. I’ve inoculated you the same way I’ve inoculated myself.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not giving you all my secrets. Just this one.” They tipped their head back toward the anomaly.

  Normally she’d call them out on that cheap deflection, but the truth was she probably wouldn’t understand an explanation, so it was pointless to push. She’d wanted to work with Arden because they were the best. But, even with Tomas’s assertions that the Nazca had considered recruiting them, she hadn’t counted on this. A savant street-hacker, sure, but they were at ease in this space. Somehow, she was certain they owned the net more than any Prime SysAdmin.

  She wished Tomas was here, so she could ask him what he really thought about Arden. Well, she wished he was here for a lot of reasons, but that one was foremost at the moment.

  The more she watched the anomaly, the more her sense of it changed. At first glance it appeared as an amorphous blob of nothing, maybe the size of the Thorn, a fluffy cloud of pulsing information. But her sense of scale in this place had been wrong.

  It was farther away than she’d thought, and much, much larger—a leviathan burgeoning in the distance. As she focused her attention, it seemed to take shape. Not into anything definitive, it remained cloudlike, but pathways emerged, connecting clusters where data coalesced to its own secret gravity. It reminded her of images she’d seen of the visible universe, and the way neurons lit up a brain.

  “It’s thinking,” she said.

  They nodded adamantly. “Yes. I believe so, too. I haven’t been able to speak with it, but I can establish a kind of… connection, if I think at it long enough. When it began it was much smaller, more chaotic. It’s far more organized now, and I believe it recognizes me enough to realize I’m not a threat.”

  “What if it thinks I’m a threat?”

  “Honestly, Commander, I can’t answer any questions you have about it. I found it. It’s been growing, becoming more and more sophisticated. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I wish I could tell you more, but I’ve been afraid to pry too deeply lest I upset whatever process it’s undergoing, and I sure as shit will not ask for advice or help from anyone else. Prime hunts down nascent intelligences for a reason. They can be dangerous, completely unpredictable.”

  “Bero meant well, I think. Even if he did terrible things.”

  “That’s why I thought you’d understand. This thing needs to be allowed to grow. I understand AI as a concept, I understand the structure of neural nets and what keeps our systems running every day. But those minds are intentionally limited.”

  “Bero called our AIs lobotomized.”

  “He wasn’t entirely wrong.” Arden rubbed the side of their face. “What I don’t understand—what no human mind could wrap itself around—is what it would be like to be a wholly new intelligence. Our AIs are constrained by their data sets.”

  “Bero was raised,” she said carefully. “I don’t have the details of the process Icarion used, but I know that his primary researcher treated his early moments as if he were a savant child. She read him stories. That’s a data set, isn’t it?”

  They cocked their head, smiling into the emptiness. “Stories are emotional-training data sets. It wasn’t a bad idea. I ne
ed you to do me a favor.”

  “What? I spent time on Bero, but this… This is so far beyond me.”

  “I want you to think at it. To give it another input that’s not me, do the whole communing thing.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “This hasn’t become some sort of weird religion for you, has it?”

  They barked a laugh. “Absolutely not.”

  “What if I’m the wrong data set?”

  They frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You understand it, as much as anyone can, because of your technical knowledge. I’m not… I’m not like you, Arden. I’m not even like most people. I work myself straight to the bone because if I stop, even for a second, and really consider the implications of everything I’ve done… Well. I don’t think you want your new mind learning that habit.”

  Lightly, Arden grasped her shoulder. “If it learns an unending drive to fix what’s broken, that wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “Unless it decides that fixing what’s broken is to do away with all of humanity.”

  They grinned. “You read too much science fiction.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes, as if that meant anything in this false world, and cleared her mind. Meditation practice was standard fare for fleeties, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d bothered to do anything more than count backward from ten. Or five. Or three. Now, pushing back from herself, watching her thoughts from a distance, tagging and setting aside any that broke through for later review—worry, fear, planning, hope—an ease came into her that she was familiar with. A clarity.

  It wasn’t a surprise, or it shouldn’t have been. They were taught these techniques for exactly this purpose, to calm the raging fires of urgency that ignited when situations got critical. But when you were caught in those fires, it was hard to remember the tool that helped you smother them.

  She breathed deeply, waiting until she had a handle on herself. Despite Arden’s reassurances, she didn’t want to risk projecting anxiety to that being. When her heart rate had slowed and the intrusive thoughts backed off, she let herself think a greeting to the mind.

  Nothing happened. She set aside frustration and tried again. She wasn’t a meatbag in the net, she was a series of electrical impulses abstracted to extremes. Just because her thoughts stayed in her head in real space didn’t mean they had to do so here. She was electricity. This was just… instant messaging.

  Recognition tickled at the edge of her senses. She tamped down a burst of excitement and kept up the steady, even flow of a greeting, hoping that it wouldn’t be seen as something equivalent to a DDoS attack.

  Its attention drifted to her, began to focus. It was further along than Arden had intimated, more than a tangled mess of being. Whatever it was, it had a sense of self, of borders between it and her and the null space in which they floated.

  But it was… new, still. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but brushing that mind felt like making silly faces at a toddler. It missed something—time, maybe, or a catalyst, to push it over a yet unseen precipice of development.

  Sanda was about to open her eyes and tell Arden her thoughts, when an impulsive thought broke through her meditation—the Little Prince, standing on a toy-sized moon, his rose friend dropping petals into the emptiness. Stories were emotional data sets.

  All the being’s other processes halted. Arden made a startled sound, but Sanda could scarcely hear them through the weight of the mind bearing down on her, probing, demanding something, but she couldn’t make sense of the weight, of the chaos.

  She tried to think a question, to ask it what it wanted, to apologize, to do anything to stop the crushing sense of all her mental faculties.

  Arden’s hand was on her shoulder, lifting her up, and she thought it such a silly thing, to lose your balance when you didn’t have a body at all.

  Recognition, then, but not hers. A shock of knowing, seizing her like a live wire. She tried to force the nebulous, pulsing mash of emotion into something coherent, but the being retreated, withdrew like a wave across the shore, taking some of her with it.

  She braced for its return, but it did not come.

  “What the fuck,” she said, when she could gather her neurons together enough to push words out. The pressure was gone, and the void at the fringes of the net surrounded her in placid indifference.

  “Are you all right?” Arden held her shoulders, steadying her, their eyes bright with worry. She wanted to punch them, straight in the gut, but that would make her feel better only for a flash. Not worth it.

  “I have absolutely no idea… I’m…” She patted herself down. Two arms, one leg, a torso and head. Nothing seemed out of place, but then this was a mental projection of her physical form. It wasn’t her body that had been in danger. It had been her mind.

  A small headache throbbed between her eyes, tapping against her skull. Without the being occupying her mind, she felt lighter, but not in a nice, relieved way. Parts of her felt hollow. Carved out.

  “I think I’m okay. It reacted to something in my thoughts. I think it knew me, which as far as I’m aware, isn’t possible.”

  Arden shoved their hands in their pockets and stared resolutely at their feet.

  “Is it?” she pressed.

  “I don’t know. Things like this don’t happen out of nowhere. The timing of the being’s formation lines up.”

  She snapped her head around to watch the amorphous mind. It hadn’t changed, but she thought she recognized something about the shape now. Something… cylindrical. “You think that’s Bero, and you threw me in there without a fucking heads-up?”

  They held up their hands in defense. “We talked about data sets, remember? If I had told you my suspicions, then you would have gone in thinking about it, and then it might have been impossible to tell if it were the real Bero, or a new being thinking it was Bero because you expected it to be.”

  “I think my headache just got worse.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I get why you did it. But you’re still a dickhead.”

  “Fair. But they reacted to you, didn’t they? They recognized you?”

  “There was a reaction, but no real thought. If he recognized me, I didn’t recognize him.”

  And shouldn’t she have? Bero kept his secrets close, but the idea that she wouldn’t recognize him even in this form was inconceivable to her. She’d spent weeks with only him for company, forty days believing he was the only thing that stood between her and an untimely death between the stars. He’d been her savior, lifeboat, and friend.

  And kind of a dickhead, too.

  “It’s not even possible. He flung himself into uncharted space. He’s gone. He can’t be here.”

  “It’s hard to say. I don’t understand the tech involved in his making, but in theory, he’s not hardware, he’s software. His mind is a digital construct and isn’t bound to any particular object. He should be able to transfer to any other hardware capable of supporting his mental processing requirements. The Prime net hardware is more than adequate for storing him, I’d think. At least, it has the space.

  “As far as facilitating his ability to process, I have no idea. It’s entirely possible his software requires specific hardware architecture for an emergence of full consciousness to take place. Humanity’s been arguing about the emergent factor for centuries—what makes a being more than the sum of its parts? But he has been growing.”

  “You’re certain no one else knows about this?”

  “As much as I can be. I have digital trip wires all around the area. I should know if anyone comes near.”

  “What about… what about the people who made him? Would they be able to, I don’t know, scan for him or something? Since they know what they’re looking for.”

  Arden pursed their lips. “It’s possible. But Icarion has bigger problems than looking for an AI-injection in Prime net space, don’t they?”

  “I’m no longer convinced Icarion created Bero without help.”


  “Rainier,” Arden said.

  “Yes. Acting either with, or independently of, her husband.”

  Arden cast an admiring eye over the cloud that may or may not be Bero. “It could be new.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Rainier was instrumental in Bero’s construction, then she knows how to create generalized artificial intelligence. Such a tool is useful—sorry for calling your friend a tool—for parsing large sets of data. If Bero is gone, and took out the second-generation weapon being worked on at Icarion, Rainier may be making her own. It would explain why this appeared shortly after Bero’s absence as easily as Bero uploading himself would. Once she realized Bero was gone, she’d get to work making a new one. Assuming her deal with Icarion had gone south, she’d have to start all over. In her position, I’d seed the intelligence in a massive storage space to give it time to self-actualize, then transfer it to the appropriate hardware once construction was complete.”

  “That’s a lot of guesswork. It seemed to recognize me, though. How would it know who I am if it’s new?”

  “Because she knows, and I’d bet a week’s worth of Udon-Voodun that she would communicate all possible threats to the mind, and that would include you. If that’s the case, then we’re lucky it wasn’t more advanced.”

  “I hate that fucking woman.”

  “Normally I leave physical violence to Nox,” Arden said, “but I really would like to get my hands on her.”

  “We all have our one.”

  “One?”

  “The one person you’d burn the universe down to save, or to condemn.”

  “And do we get one of each?”

  She smiled to herself, tight and strained. “No. Life’s never that clean.”

  CHAPTER 53

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  ONCE MORE INTO AN UNKIND UNIVERSE

  Tomas swam in pain and light. The horizon of his world contracted to the shield of his eyelids, no matter how hard he tried to open them. Limbs were a distant memory—torso and head and lips and fingers and everything an abstract memory, a taste of having been a being that was, somehow, irrelevant to who he was.